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Top Forums UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers Hard Disk drive space gone missing... Post 302073280 by Ecclesiastes on Thursday 11th of May 2006 12:11:06 PM
Old 05-11-2006
Quote:
Originally Posted by amro1
it is a good question BTW. First the manufacturers of hard drives since 2002 respecified Kbyte, Mbyte and Gbyte and they came up with “very smart” solution to call Kb =10e3, Mb=10e6 and Gb=10e9 respectively. It allows them to sell drives as higher capacity, as the real capacity is to be measured in a real Kilo, mega and Giga as K=2e10, M=2e20 and G=2e30 respectively.
The difference is quite significant as for 100Gb drive the presupposed capacity would be
100x2e30= 107374182400 when the “their” capacity is 100x10e9, that is some 7Gb less !
After that, not all the drive capacity is accessible to data as drives aren't used as RAW drives normally, but require to be formatted. Formatting drive means introducing the system of coordinated to the drive geometry so the a position of the some particular byte may be specified to the driver which will address the data on a drive. As you can imagine, the whole space has to be mapped so it takes additional average 7% of a drive space. So it is where your gigabytes have vanished.

Addressing second question, I'm not sure what your definition of “lot a trouble is”. For my taste it had never worked before in a fashion it wouldn't drive me out of my mind and for the reason I abandoned PC platform completely and use OS X on Apple hardware exclusively.
But is entirely different subject. You can try Mandrake Linux, so far it was most polished and relatively peacefully coexisted with Windows (and easy to install in another partition as Mandrake can do it automatically).

Hope it helps.
man that really sucks about redefining the sizes and what not. Imagine it though, I have only about 65G on a machine that says on paper has 80G, thats totally outrageous. Would it be the same you think if I opted for a different manufacturer, would 80G end up being 65G or is DELL just over the top? I mean I can understand the use of the 7% of my space but 7% does not equal to 15G, its like I have lost 10G worth of space...

Thanks for the info though, really helps and sets things in perspective.

With the 2nd Q, I was just wondering whether I would get some problems for example installing linux on the 2nd partition as a result of maybe not creating the partition right or maybe as a result of some obsecure windows system setting preventing me from installing linux properly??. Do I have to format the HD though since my laptop already came with XP home edition installed on it before I can create the 2 partitions?

thanks
 

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CD(9)							   BSD Kernel Developer's Manual						     CD(9)

NAME
cd -- CDROM driver for the CAM SCSI subsystem DESCRIPTION
The cd device driver provides a read only interface for CDROM drives (SCSI type 5) and WORM drives (SCSI type 4) that support CDROM type com- mands. Some drives do not behave as the driver expects. See the QUIRKS section for information on possible flags. QUIRKS
Each CD-ROM device can have different interpretations of the SCSI spec. This can lead to drives requiring special handling in the driver. The following is a list of quirks that the driver recognize. CD_Q_NO_TOUCH This flag tells the driver not to probe the drive at attach time to see if there is a disk in the drive and find out what size it is. This flag is currently unimplemented in the CAM cd driver. CD_Q_BCD_TRACKS This flag is for broken drives that return the track numbers in packed BCD instead of straight decimal. If the drive seems to skip tracks (tracks 10-15 are skipped) then you have a drive that is in need of this flag. CD_Q_NO_CHANGER This flag tells the driver that the device in question is not a changer. This is only necessary for a CDROM device with multiple luns that are not a part of a changer. CD_Q_CHANGER This flag tells the driver that the given device is a multi-lun changer. In general, the driver will figure this out auto- matically when it sees a LUN greater than 0. Setting this flag only has the effect of telling the driver to run the initial read capacity command for LUN 0 of the changer through the changer scheduling code. CD_Q_10_BYTE_ONLY This flag tells the driver that the given device only accepts 10 byte MODE SENSE/MODE SELECT commands. In general these types of quirks should not be added to the cd(4) driver. The reason is that the driver does several things to attempt to determine whether the drive in question needs 10 byte commands. First, it issues a CAM Path Inquiry command to determine whether the protocol that the drive speaks typically only allows 10 byte commands. (ATAPI and USB are two prominent exam- ples of protocols where you generally only want to send 10 byte commands.) Then, if it gets an ILLEGAL REQUEST error back from a 6 byte MODE SENSE or MODE SELECT command, it attempts to send the 10 byte version of the command instead. The only reason you would need a quirk is if your drive uses a protocol (e.g., SCSI) that typically does not have a problem with 6 byte commands. FILES
/sys/cam/scsi/scsi_cd.c is the driver source file. SEE ALSO
cd(4), scsi(4) HISTORY
The cd manual page first appeared in FreeBSD 2.2. AUTHORS
This manual page was written by John-Mark Gurney <jmg@FreeBSD.org>. It was updated for CAM and FreeBSD 3.0 by Kenneth Merry <ken@FreeBSD.org>. BSD
March 25, 2014 BSD
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